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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Destiny and I decided to have some painting fun today. A couple of times while surfing Pinterest I remember seeing some kids' art made by using forks dipped in paint to make flowers. So that's what Destiny and I decided to do, and we had a ball!

Now the neat part about this, other than the flowers made from forks, is that the background for this canvas was actually created by my grandson, Dylan when he was 3 or 4 years old (he's 10 now). He wasn't all that into the artsy stuff like Destiny is, but I convinced him one day to create something by just using a small foam roller to roll fluorescent paint all over this canvas. He had fun doing that, but I wasn't sure what to do with the canvas, so I just tucked it away. I pulled it out today and decided that Destiny and I would try out the fork flower technique I'd seen. She really loved it!

All you have to do is dip a plastic fork into paint--we used a combination of tempera and craft acrylic paints for this--then set the fork down on the canvas and rock it back and forth a bit to "print" the flowers. Then just add stems and leaves to finish them off. And Destiny and I decided to add some grass too. Destiny is 4 and she did most of this herself. I only did 3 of the flower prints, 2 stems, and 1 leaf--and I showed her how to make grass, but she did almost all of that herself too. :)

I love that I have this canvas now to keep in the "kids" room. And the best part is that BOTH of my grandkids actually painted this--even if it was 6 years apart. Super fun and really easy to do too, it really was a perfect almost-summer art activity!

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

It was such a busy holiday weekend, but I still managed to find time to finish my little Believe Fairy mixed media painting on Sunday.

This is done on a 6" square canvas. I'm actually finding it more difficult to paint on small canvases than on large. It just makes it more challenging to get the details right when the canvas is small. But I still loved doing this one. Sometimes it's just all about the fairies. :) I'll just add too that the color is a bit off in this photo. It looks much better in person. LOL.

Monday, May 19, 2014

I missed last week's prompt for Journal52 because of Mother's Day, so I'm playing catch-up a bit. So now I'm also 2 behind on my Documented Life prompts--since I was getting caught up on J52. Oy! But oh well. Last week's challenge was Photography. So for this page I took a photo I tore out of a magazine years ago, of Drew Barrymore and used that for my inspiration.

I think Drew is so beautiful. This was a multi-page photo spread at the time, with Drew basically dressed in various beautiful gowns in lovely settings. In this case she was a version of Beauty, in Beauty in the Beast. I think she looks sort of melancholy in this photo, so I picked a little poem by Lang Leav to go with the image.

Monday, May 12, 2014

For Mother's Day, Destiny and I made some wonderful gifts that we had a blast making. We made some Flower Pots, and the "roses" in the pots where made using prints made from celery!

I was cutting up some celery a few weeks ago and remembered seeing a celery-printing project on Pinterest. So I cut the end off of the celery and grabbed some pink paint and paper and had Destiny dip the celery "butt" into the paint and then print it on a paper several times. I told her we were making roses and she had a ball. I let those dry and saved them until last week. At that point I cut out the printed roses and laminated them.

I had purchased some cheap terracotta pots at Michael's and we painted them together in my studio. Destiny loves to paint and she had a ball doing these. We also had some wooden sticks I'd saved from some meals at Captain D's (they had shrimp on them) and I'd washed them up and stuck them away. They would be perfect stems for our flowers. So we stuck those sticks into Styrofoam balls I'd cut in half--to hold them up while we painted them green.

Once everything was dry, I stuck the Styrofoam balls, with the sticks still in the center of them, into the pots. We covered the foam with Spanish moss, and then I stuck some leaves from some silk flowers I had over the sticks and pushed them down to the bottom. The leaves were attached by some plastic in the center that had holes right in the middle, and they fit perfectly over the sticks (thank goodness). The final step was to attach the laminated roses to the green sticks with some hot glue--which I did myself so that miss Destiny wouldn't be burning her fingers on the glue.

We made three flower pots: one for her Mommy, one for her Great Grandma, and one for her other Grandma (her Daddy's mom). I kinda wish we'd made one for me too. :) But we had a lot of fun making these and they were perfect gifts for Mother's Day--flowers that never need watering and that will never die!

In my Etsy shoppe you will find primarily art prints--just Giclee Prints at this point--but I may be adding other types of prints as well in the near future. I also plan to list other artsy/creative originals and projects from time to time, so be sure to have a peek at what is available.

In my Society6 shoppe you will find not only a variety of prints available, but also note cards, cell phone covers, mugs, pillows, tote bags, shirts, clocks and more--all with my art on them. Please stop by and have a look around, especially while the FREE SHIPPING promo is still in effect! Buy now and save $$$. These kinds of things make great gifts too--for you, or for someone else. :)

And should you ever lose those links, they are always available on the left side of the blog. You can always email me too, if you like, and I'll be happy to send you the links. Be sure to check us out on Facebook too. I post lots of fun art quotes and inspiration there--so there's always something new to see on the FB page! If you have any questions please feel free to let me know. :)

The theme for this week's Journal52 challenge is "Hands." So we needed to put hands in our artwork somewhere. This is what I did.

This photo looks darker than the actual art journal page, but you get the idea. I did this mostly with some color sprays and ink. The hand with the words in it was made using an online tool I found. And the quote is mine. :)

This week's challenge at The Documented Life is to illustrate a Random Act of Kindness in some way. It could be a RAK we've witnessed or one we've done for others. I decided to illustrate a RAK I did for a blogger named Joann, whose blog (Laundry Hurts My Feelings) I have followed for some time. She is a wonderful writer and always makes me smile in her posts.

Well one day, a few years ago or so, her blog graphics all disappeared. She posted about it because she was at a loss for what to do; she had no idea how to fix it because her blog had been setup by her designer. And that was the real problem. Her designer hosted all of Joann's blog graphics--and the graphics of all her other clients--on her own PhotoBucket account. The designer closed her PhotoBucket account, and as a result, every client of hers ended up with a blog with no graphics! Joann didn't realize any of this, but I did and let her know what had happened, and offered to fix her blog for her as well.

I was able to retrieve Joann's graphics from cached web pages, thank goodness. And I had her blog restored in relatively short order. I was happy to help her and expected nothing in return. After all, what good are we if we can't help someone simply because we can...and we WANT to?! But imagine my surprise later when I received a package from her with a lovely art print in it, which now hangs in my studio. I will treasure it always, as a reminder of how kindness can bring people together.

So anyway, this is my journal page spread dedicated to that RAK. It is not very artsy, as I really focused more on documenting it rather than making art this time. And I added a quote that I have always loved as well.

It is true: No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. If you can help someone, you should. It's as simple as that.